London Calling

What better way to celebrate my return to blogging than a predictably lame title pun? That's right, I'm baaack, and this time blogging from London, which I'm still getting used to. People here drive on the wrong side of the road, they manage to keep their spit on the inside and the shops generally shut at five o'clock. In the evening. Yep, it's a strange place to come back to after Shanghai, especially since this is the first time I've been back in about six years. There are times when I really have to stop myself forming a scrum of one when I try to get onto the "tube" as people in countries other than China seem to have developed this amazing social practice, which I think is known as (though don't quote me) queuing. Basically, it's people just spontaneously forming a line, one after the other. It all seemed a bit technical to me at first, but I'm gradually relearning this fantastic skill, though it's not as easy as it looks. At first I thought there'd be someone handing out numbers to organize who stood where, but (unbelievably, I might add) it seems to be more of an ad-hoc arrangement. Gads, is it any wonder they, uhhh, we had an empire on which the sun never setted? Many say the past is a foreign country, and I couldn't agree more. My return to this fair and sceptered isle has provided me with my first case of Delhi belly in years, no doubt due to English cuisine's world-renowned richness and piquancy. I've run the gamut, from fish and chips all the way to jam on toast, and it's been a helter-skelter ride of thrills, spills and general unpredictability all the way. More later. Unless I starve to death in the middle of the night through not being able to buy a bag of "crisps." Or fall over stone-cold dead from the sensory overload of a runny boiled egg with (deep breath) soldiers. Or just get lazy again. You know what I'm like by now...